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Conference 2024 Telford: Full report
Session 2: Graham Feest
Conference finds no clear road ahead
for graduated driving licences
The questions asked:
How many members of your group would support the introduction of Graduated
Driving Licences (GDL), which would mean placing restrictions on newly qualified
drivers after they had passed their test?
Irrespective of your position on the matter:
1. If we were to place restrictions on new drivers once they had passed their test, for
what period of time should they be in place?
2. How are we going to monitor and police such restrictions?
3. What do you consider we would gain by introducing such restrictions?
Road safety consultant Graham Feest
chaired a fast-paced session focused on
post-test restrictions for new drivers – or
graduated driving licences, as they are
often known.
Delegates around each table were tasked
with finding answers to questions on
whether more post-test restrictions were
needed (a sample of which is posted above),
what was needed for a more formal
graduated licence, and whether any
measures stood the chance of being both
accepted by the public and being effective in
reducing new driver crash statistics.
The issue of 17-25-year-olds being
involved in crashes within 12 months of
passing their L-test is of great concern to
many, but despite a number of heartbreaking
stories over the years, the
toughest sanction the UK has come up with
thus far is to reduce the number of penalty
points a new driver can accrue before a ban
kicks in.
So the question posed was, should the
New Drivers’ Act be made stronger?
Some ideas
Popular ideas included reducing the size
of engines on new drivers’ cars, curbs on
night-time driving and carrying passengers,
and post-test assessments by ADIs.
But while most delegates agreed
something should be done, there was little
consensus around what. Stopping nighttime
driving seemed an obvious way to
tackle anti-social driving and problems
around alcohol and drug use, but it would
curb young peoples’ abilities to work in the
night-time economy. Carrying passengers
would be difficult to enforce and the slow
switch to electric vehicles made reducing
engine size on new drivers’ cars feel like an
outdated idea.
While the idea of post-test assessments
were popular, it was pointed out that few
ADIs had the capacity to train all local
learners at the moment, let alone take on a
new type of clients.
Perhaps a better idea was a more
structured training programme to begin
with, combined with the compulsory use of
telematics post-test to capture data and
“Most delegates agreed something should be done but there was
little consensus around what.... stopping night-time driving
seemed an obvious way to tackle anti-social driving and
problems around alcohol and drug use, but it would curb
young peoples’ abilities to work in the night-time economy.
Carrying passengers would be difficult to enforce...”
identify problems.
This latter idea, when linked to insurance
policies, has generated positive outcomes
for some new drivers; why not roll it out
across the whole of the new driver
community?
Other ideas floated included a second
test a set time after the first – though with
DVSA currently struggling to fulfil ‘first test’
demands, it was hard to see how it could
accommodate a second.
Stopping parents from teaching driving
was another option - though with the DVSA
being big supporters of private practice, and
this having been linked to L-test success,
again, it was hard to see it gaining traction.
Many ADIs expressed the view that Pass
Plus needed more support and a marketing
campaign could encourage more new
drivers to not think their learning journey
had ended at the L-test.
But as Tom Kwok pointed out, while
20 NEWSLINK n APRIL 2024